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Where Do Terms Go?
Over the past several weeks, we have looked at various topics involving taxonomies and thesauri. And we have seen that controlled vocabularies are an important part of search and browsing. But how are taxonomies put to use? What about the terms? Where do they go? Exactly how are they put to use in search? What are the different ways that a taxonomy can be used in search?
Read MoreFacets and Search
Most of you who have studied library science or information science are familiar with faceted classification as developed by Indian mathematician and librarian S. R. Ranganathan (1892-1972). His main contribution was the colon classification system the first faceted classification. It allowed multiple multiple classifications to be assigned to an object, rather than a single pre-coordinated taxonomic designation. Dr. Ranganathan is still pretty popular in the search world, especially in e-commerce. The Endeca faceted search module is popular with online marketers, because they are looking at lots of different kinds of ways to filter data.
Read MoreInverted Files, Parsing, Discovery, and Clustering
Last time, I told you that inverted files and Boolean are basic to most or all search. So, what we have is the inverted file – that big alphabetical list of all the terms and where they came from – and a way to combine them. At the end of the day, no matter which direction you come from on the high end and even higher presentation levels, you are depending on these two to make it work. If you add that taxonomy to that, you are strengthening the use of your terms.
Read MoreKinds of Search
There are search systems that are advertised as keyword search. There are ones that say that they are Bayesian. There are ones that are Boolean. There are ones that are primarily ranking algorithms.
Read MoreMeasuring Accuracy in Search
When people talk about how accurate the search is, there are lots of different ways to measure that. This list indicates some of the ways that we talk about measuring accuracy.
Read MoreHow Search Works
Search has many parts. The parts of search are moving parts and every system does it a little differently. There’s the search software, based on one of two major camps. Then, there’s the computer network that it’s riding on. Then, there’s the way that the text is parsed, which is not always the same.
Read MoreSearch Engines and Related Tools
A search engine is different from search software. The terms are used interchangeably by people, but they are not the same. Search software is an application – a bunch of codes – and a search engine is a collection of servers with a lot of data on it that is indexing the Internet and delivering it by HTML pages to customers. It is doing that by spidering around to get the information, usually from those metaname headers, and now increasingly from full text and putting that information up and comparing it, searching it. You all have some idea of how Google, Lycos, Bing, and all those other ones work, so you know what happens here. Again, a search engine is different from search software.
Read MoreWhy is a consultant not a “vendor?”
It’s time to consider “services” to be “products,” at least where meetings and conferences are concerned.
Wikipedia says “IBM treats its business as a service business. Although it still manufactures computers, it sees the physical goods as a small part of the “business solutions” industry. They have found that the price of demand for “business solutions” is much lower than for hardware. There has been a corresponding shift to a subscription pricing model. Rather than receiving a single payment for a piece of manufactured equipment, many manufacturers are now receiving a steady stream of revenue for ongoing contracts.” The change is significant.
Read MoreRDF: A Wrapper for Metadata
In information management, a wrapper is a program that translates tagged data into relational form, so that databases can deal with it. We’re interested in this because some of that tagged data includes subject terms, keywords, or whatever you want to call taxonomy terms that have been used to describe documents.
Read MoreDublin Core: Sort of a Metadata Standard
The Dublin Core metadata guidelines started in 1995 in Dublin, Ohio which is why they are called the Dublin Core. The beginning was actually in the basement of the OCLC building, in March of 1995. In April of 1996, the Dublin Core advocates went to Warwick, England, where they had another conference. So there are Warwick Conventions for the Dublin Core. So there’s no mystery about the names; these things are just named after the places where they started.
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